Media/Policy Watch
This section is intended to alert readers to substantive news, analysis and opinion from the general media on vaccines, immunization, global; public health and related themes. Media Watch is not intended to be exhaustive, but indicative of themes and issues CVEP is actively tracking. This section will grow from an initial base of newspapers, magazines and blog sources, and is segregated from Journal Watch above which scans the peer-reviewed journal ecology.

We acknowledge the Western/Northern bias in this initial selection of titles and invite suggestions for expanded coverage. We are conservative in our outlook in adding news sources which largely report on primary content we are already covering above. Many electronic media sources have tiered, fee-based subscription models for access. We will provide full-text where content is published without restriction, but most publications require registration and some subscription level.

Council on Foreign Relations
http://www.cfr.org/
Accessed 29 August 2015
Backgrounder
Global Efforts to Eradicate Polio
by Danielle Renwick August 12, 2015
Though polio had nearly been eradicated, the virus is on the rise amid an increase in violence against vaccine workers in conflict zones. This Backgrounder examines the challenges to eradicating the disease.

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Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/
Accessed 29 August 2015
NOVA’s ‘Calling The Shots’ On Autism And Vaccines
“There is so much evidence, none of which shows any link between vaccines and autism, that you have to say, “Enough!”
Emily Willingham, Contributor Aug 26, 2015

NIH Director Follows The Facts To Fight Ebola And AIDS
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, shares some of his experiences leading the national fight against HIV/AIDS, and most recently the Ebola epidemic that swept across West Africa. We discuss the future of infectious disease research, misinformation on […]
Josh Wolfe, Forbes/Wolfe Emerging Tech Report Aug 26, 2015

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Foreign Affairs
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/
Accessed 29 August 2015
Essay September/October 2015 Issue West Africa Health
Ebola’s Lessons – How the WHO Mishandled the Crisis
By Laurie Garrett

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Foreign Policy
http://foreignpolicy.com/
Accessed 29 August 2015
As Saudi Arabia Grapples With MERS Outbreak, a Vaccine Is in Sight
By Thomas Stackpole
August 21, 2015 – 5:02 pm

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The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
Accessed 29 August 2015
Republican candidate Carly Fiorina’s Fuzzy Vaccine Claims Debunked

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Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/
Accessed 29 August 2015
Doctors learn to push back, gently, against anti-vaccination movement
25 August 2015
The doctors shifted nervously in their seats as the sharp-tongued questioner scanned the room.
Dr. Paul Offit, a University of Pennsylvania pediatrician and the nation’s most outspoken childhood vaccine proponent, had come to the UCLA lecture hall to subject several dozen physicians to a faux parental grilling.
He wanted to give them the kind of pushback doctors have come to expect in affluent parts of Los Angeles and California, where increasing numbers of parents are refusing to inoculate their kids against contagious, even life-threatening diseases for fear of complications.
For many of the pediatricians in the audience, taking a hard line on the immunization schedule can mean potentially alienating well-intentioned, if misinformed, parents.
If Offit, a rock star in his field, could give these doctors more factual ammunition — and a little practice on their delivery — could they help convince resistant parents that science is simply not on their side?…

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New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
Accessed 29 August 2015
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
Children Die Because People Are Wrongly Afraid of Vaccines
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD AUG. 20, 2015
Of all the threats to human life confronted by international health workers, few cause as heavy a toll as what is termed “vaccine hesitancy” — the delay or refusal by misinformed people to accept vaccination for themselves and their children. An estimated one in five children went without lifesaving vaccines globally last year, adding to the grim toll of 1.5 million children who die annually for lack of immunization, according to the World Health Organization.
This problem is only compounded by the challenge workers face in convincing skeptical publics to put aside what science shows are local myths and dangerous indifference. Citing the fight against Ebola, Dr. Philippe Duclos, senior adviser for the W.H.O.’s immunization programs, noted how “engaging with communities and persuading individuals to change their habits and behaviors is a linchpin of public health success.” Unfortunately, there is no easy prescription for how to change these habits.
The resistance to vaccines is worldwide, encompassing rural ethnic minorities opposed to needles to wealthy urbanites with suspicions about whether vaccines cause autism. At one extreme is the vicious use of force by Taliban gunmen who murder polio vaccination workers, thereby assuring that hundreds of children were crippled last year. No less insidiously, even greater numbers died globally from a wide range of diseases encouraged by the ignorance of adults who failed to accept immunization for their families.
Religious or philosophical objections play a role, according to experts who have found that not even a higher level of education is a guarantee against vaccine hesitancy. All of this only compounds the subtle challenges of enforcement and education that health care workers and governments have no choice but to pursue, since the lives of millions of children remain at risk.

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Health
Vaccinations Bring Hope, Bracelets Deliver Reminders
New York Times AUG. 22, 2015
Because of the vaccine alliance Gavi, United Nations agencies, the World Bank, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other donors, immunizations have soared in developing countries over the last 15 years. As a result, an estimated seven million children have survived infancy who before the year 2000 would have died young.
But vaccine schedules are increasingly complex, and young mothers often forget to take children in for shots on time.
A clever solution occurred to Lauren Braun, a former Cornell pre-med student, when she spent a summer working in Peru, traveling to villages to remind mothers to take children to clinics for immunizations.
Her nonprofit company, Alma Sana, makes flexible silicon bracelets — like the yellow Livestrong bands so popular a decade ago. But hers come in pink or blue, fit around a newborn’s ankle, and serve as tiny calendars.
For example, beneath the number 4 on the bracelet — four months of age — are a triangle, a circle, an X and a square. They represent the vaccines against polio, pneumonia and rotavirus, as well as the pentavalent shot, which protects against five diseases.
As the baby receives each one, a nurse uses a hole punch to puncture the appropriate mark. When every mark on the bracelet is punched, the baby is fully protected.
Ms. Braun received a grant from the Gates Foundation to test the bracelets, which cost only 10 cents each, in clinics in Peru and Ecuador. She surveyed 150 mothers; 91 percent said the bracelets helped them remember, and all the nurses praised them.
She has now started a video fund-raising campaign to support a randomized, controlled trial involving 5,000 mothers and infants in Nigeria, Pakistan and Colombia.
If she can raise enough money to prove her idea works, Ms. Braun said, she would like to offer mothers more options, such as bracelets in bigger sizes to fit growing children, bracelets that read right to left for Asian cultures, and even bracelets in colors other than pink or blue.
The blue-for-boys, pink-for-girls stereotype was invented by an American marketer a century ago and, she said, is “kind of a westernized idea.”

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TED Talk
25 August 2015
Seth Berkley: The troubling reason why vaccines are made too late … if they’re made at all
It seems like we wait for a disastrous disease outbreak before we get serious about making a vaccine for it. Seth Berkley lays out the market realities and unbalanced risks behind why we aren’t making vaccines for the world’s biggest diseases.

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Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page?_wsjregion=na,us&_homepage=/home/us
Accessed 29 August 2015
Vaccine Injury Payouts Rise
The U.S. government is about to make it easier for claimants to be compensated when vaccinations are improperly injected
By Ianthe Jeanne Dugan
Aug. 24, 2015 11:38 a.m. ET

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Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Accessed 29 August 2015
The end of polio in Africa?
By Editorial Board
August 20, 2015
AFRICA HAS reported some genuinely good news in the battle to eradicate polio. Late last month , Nigeria passed a full year without a case of wild poliovirus. As of Aug. 11, it has been a year since the last case was detected anywhere on the continent (it was in Somalia). These anniversaries are unofficial milestones, but they point toward continued progress against polio, a scourge that once claimed hundreds of thousands of lives each year. Unfortunately, polio has shown a fierce tendency to return. Hopefully this time will be different.
Nigeria’s accomplishment is impressive. The country suffered a major setback in the struggle against the disease more than a decade ago when a state governor and religious leaders in the predominantly Islamic north put into effect a year-long vaccination ban, claiming that the vaccines were contaminated by the West to spread sterility and HIV/AIDS among Muslims. This led to a wider outbreak of the virus, which is highly contagious, largely strikes children under 5 years old and can cause permanent paralysis. Another effort by Nigeria to come to grips with polio in 2009 seemed to falter when the militant group Boko Haram carried out a wave of violent attacks in the north that disrupted vaccination. The oral vaccine is effective if it can be given to enough children to prevent and interrupt transmission. As recently as 2012, Nigeria had 122 cases — and it now is down to zero.
A valuable lesson from Nigeria is that containing polio requires a multifaceted campaign that goes beyond dispensing vaccines. One important tactic was to address head-on the rumors and myths about the vaccine that undermined earlier campaigns. Local volunteers were brought in to build trust. Health teams used “hit and run” tactics to enter a dangerous area quickly, vaccinate and then exit. Yet another approach was to offer “health camps” that provided a wide array of everyday medical treatments, not just for polio, which gave parents an incentive to bring their children for vaccination. Nigeria also benefited from the determined focus of organizations such as Rotary International, which invested $207 million to fight polio in the country, as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and others.
Africa must be free of the virus for two more years, under rigorous surveillance, before the WHO can declare it polio-free. The progress so far is fragile, but real, and attention should now be focused on campaigns against polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the last two nations where it is endemic. Pakistan is making a fresh attempt to corral the virus, and so far this year has only 29 cases, compared with 115 at the same time last year (and a year-end total of 306 ). Everyone ought to draw from Nigeria’s experience, which showed that battling polio is not only about the vaccinations but also about waging a complex war of logistics and, ultimately, winning over the hearts and minds of people.